Originally Posted by
GuitarGeek
No, the GX-1 was a production instrument, albeit a very expensive one (and I checked a couple websites, the price tag was more $60,000!). I believe I read that less than a hundred were made. John Paul Jones actually owned a GX-1, you can see him using it on the Knebworth footage on the Led Zeppelin DVD. He later sold his instrument to Emerson, who cannibalized it to repair his old, heavily customized GX-1, which had been attacked by a runaway tractor. Emerson said the repaired instrument worked fine for awhile, until one day he took break in the studio to make a sandwich, came back 10 minutes later, and the room was full of smoke.
Stevie Wonder had two, one of which was eventually loaned to Madame Tussaud's for a display. I heard a story that Stevie's keyboard tech told once about moving the GX-1. Apparently, Stevie decided to move a bunch of his gear out of his studio and into a warehouse where he kept stuff in storage. The way the tech told it, apparently the truck driver didn't realize that there was one more item going onto the truck, so when he came out with the GX-1 on the forklift, the truck was gone. Since the warehouse was just a few miles down the road, he decided to attempt to deliver the GX-1 on the forklift. He apparently got about 3 miles before a police car pulled him over and informed him that he was going to have to make other arrangements.
The PS3300 was the polyphonic modular synth, wasn't it? I remember Emerson later in the 80's appearing in ads for Korg.
Yeah, you're right about Crichton playing the Multimoog in the Don't Be Late video. But the way he told in the one interview, they didn't actually have an endorsement deal with Moog Music, mainly because they already owned just about everything Moog was making at the time.
Could be, they had been using PPG gear since 76, I think, so it makes sense that Herr Wolfgang would send whatever prototypes he working on over for Herr Edgar and Herr Christopher could road test/R&D it or whatever. But they used plenty of other synths too.
I'm not sure about Tangram specifically, since there's no instrument credits on that one, but judging from photos I've seen from the Palast Der Republik concert from January 1980 and the tours they did in 81/82, I'm guessing there might also be some Polymoog, Prophet-5, and Oberheim OB-X. I know Chris Franke said he used an Oberheim OB-1 through a fuzz for a bit on side two of Tangram, which he said a lot of people had mistaken for Edgar's guitar. Later, around the time of Logos, I believe there's concert footage showing Johannes Schmoelling playing a Jupiter-8 onstage.
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